Carulia Oneshots

You're gone (and i'm all alone)

Last day of Carulia week!

~Julia finally cries at Carmen's funeral

~words: 1194

....

Julia stood at the rain-streaked window crading a mug of tea that had cooled long ago, staring vacantly out. Everything was dull, everything was drab. The world seemed to have been drained all of its color in a single week, along with her inclination to wear them. The same single week during which Julia's life had turned upside down and collapsed in on itself.

Her eyes burned with unshed tears, but she wouldn't cry no matter how bad it hurt, her tear ducts seemed frozen. She hadn't cried a single tear since she had gotten the call. Julia now understood why the saddest parts in movies involved no dramatic sobbing. Some pain was too deep to express. It could only be felt, it could only be endured.

Julia heard the quiet creak as someone opened the door. She turned slightly. The female redhead–Ivy–came up next to her quietly. "We're almos' ready, Jules–er, Julia." Julia noticed Ivy's stutter and felt a pang in her heart. Carmen called— had called her that.

It seemed as long ago as a past life.

"Jus' thought I should tell you. Carlotta's gonna be here in a bit. She said she's gonna come see you before the, the uh...I'll be downstairs."

Julia bowed her head slightly in acknowledgement as Ivy awkwardly made her escape, the lump in her throat not allowing her to speak. She was afraid that the strange empty feeling would come tumbling out. Julia hadn't missed the stutter. Ivy meant well, but her word choice had very nearly caused Julia's emotions to jump start and she couldn't afford to lose her poise and willpower now. 

Julia would need all of her willpower for the memorial service.

She stepped away from the window and toward a freestanding mirror to inspect herself as the doorbell one again sounded throughout the house. She studied herself warily. Black slacks, black button down, black blazer. The golden triangle shaped pendant necklace that Carmen had given her. She fingered it absently. The same round glasses she had always worn. The usual hint of red was missing from her attire for the first time. How could she bear to wear such a cheerful color– her color–on an occasion like this?

Julia sighed. She hadn't gotten much sleep the past few days, but there was nothing she could do. She glanced out the window at the rain drenched world once more. Julia could almost hear Carmen calling her. Rainy afternoons were the times that they used to cuddle up with a blanket and a book–most often an ancient history volume–and read for hours at a time.

Jules, where'd you go? She would say. Mysteries of the Olmecs is calling your name!

She had loved those afternoons.

A knock on the bedroom door snapped Julia from her reverie, and Carlotta walked into the room. At the sight of her Julia almost collapsed in shock.

Carlotta looked so painfully like her daughter. Almost like Carmen would have looked if she had lived to see her fortieth birthday.

Carlotta froze, probably reading Julia's expression for what it was, and rushed to envelop her in a hug.

"Oh, Julia."

She didn't say anything else, for which Julia was grateful. Carlotta must've known that she didn't want to hear another empty and insincere sounding "I'm sorry."

Julia tightened her hold on the woman, releasing a shuddering breath. This was the closest she had come to tears since she had gotten the call, a week earlier minutes before one of her most important seminars of the semester.

"Is this Julia Argent?"

"It is," she had answered.

"I'm sorry to inform you but your fiancee was caught in a warehouse fire earlier this afternoon. We weren't able to save her."

No matter how many times she had heard variations of the same line on medical dramas, that didn't stop the world from falling out from under her feet. Carmen couldn't be dead. She couldn't. She had kissed Julia goodbye and told her some stupid joke just that morning. The operator was lying.

"Miss? We need you to come to the hospital as soon as possible."

Just then her teaching assistant had come to get her for the lecture, so she couldn't afford to have her emotions take over just yet. Instead she had suffered through the entire three hour seminar, in a state of silent shock.

Julia knew the risk of the job. Hell, Carmen had known the risk of the job. But when one was as good at evading threats as Carmen was, the dangers weren't as apparent.

Which made it all the harder when the danger caught up and killed her.

VILE had set fire to that warehouse and left her for dead.

By time the paramedics had gotten to the warehouse, there wasn't much of her body left to save. It was charred and unrecognizable except for a few strips of red fabric and her cell phone that had miraculously evaded the flames, laying a few feet away.

So here Julia stood, embracing her dead fiancee's mother, the image of Carmen's badly burned and lifeless body seared into her mind, struggling to hold back tears in vain. Yet Carlotta still stood with her in silence, tracing soothing circles on Julia's back.

Julia sniffed as the doorbell rang again. "I suppose we should bring her ashes to the memorial."

                                                                             ***

The rain still hadn't stopped. The small band of people that had come to the memorial service stood somberly in front of Dexter Wolfe's memorial. Player only contacted the few people that Carmen had impacted during her life, the few people he knew she would want to see her to her final resting place--although none of them had dreamed that it would be this soon. Shadowsan and Hideo, Sonia, Carlotta and Julia, and of course Zack and Ivy. Even Player was there in the flesh.

Carmen hadn't wanted a big gathering, so they had made a quiet arrangement with the owner. Carmen's final resting place would be on her father's memorial.

Julia thought that it was fitting how Carmen had been so fixated on finding her family, to be able to know them, and she was able to be with her father in death, if not in life.

And with that thought, after a week of numbness, a single tear fell from Julia's eyes. And suddenly she was crying, releasing all of the pain, all of the heartache that she had been carrying around all week. Mourning her dead fiancée at the ripe old age of thirty.

It only made her cry harder.

Shadowsan stepped forward grimly and handed her the urn.

You're gone and I'm all alone, Carmen. What am I supposed to do?

The rain hid the tears streaming down her face as she set the urn next to Carmen's father's memorial and stood there, memories playing in her head of past times with her love, of things she had wanted to say desperately but never did. She would never be able to now.

The guests trickled away one by one until it was just Julia and Carlotta under a single black umbrella, mourning a soul stolen before her time.